


Humanity's Next Step

by FlightOfInsanity



Category: Halo (Video Games) & Related Fandoms
Genre: Gen, Metahuman AU, but it was inspired by the flash, this isn't ~really~ a crossover
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-05-12
Updated: 2016-05-14
Packaged: 2018-06-08 00:59:03
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 2,494
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6832405
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/FlightOfInsanity/pseuds/FlightOfInsanity
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Metahumans in Halo because why not.</p><p>Each chapter is going to focus on a specific character. The character tag list will get updated as chapters/characters get added.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. John-117

There was no such thing as luck.

Everyone always told him that he was lucky, that luck was on his side, that someone had good luck or bad luck or no luck at all. John knew better, though. Luck was just a word people used to feel better about the fact that they had no control over the world around them. _Luck_ made you feel nice, like the universe would be forgiving if you asked for a bit of luck.

The universe, John knew, didn’t care. It was indifferent; driven by probabilities and statistics. But people interpreted math and statistics as cold and unforgiving and so they called it luck and destiny.

He wasn’t lucky.

Lucky people wouldn’t get abducted by their own government at six years old. Lucky people wouldn’t be put through a basic training more rigorous than the ODSTs went through. Lucky people wouldn’t have to watch more than half their new brothers and sisters die or be horribly mangled by augmentation.

He was not lucky.

He just knew how to stack the deck.

Well… It wasn’t really something he knew. At least, nothing he would be able to explain if you asked him to. He had tried once, as a child, before he was taken. He tried to explain to one of his teachers how he could fall off the top of the jungle gym for the fifth time and be fine, but another kid could trip on the sidewalk once and break his wrist.

It was like a cloud in the back of his mind, he’d said. Or, well, not a cloud. More like mist on top of a cold river. But not mist. And not a river.

He didn’t know how to articulate it, but he could see chance; see probabilities. At first, seeing it was all he could do, but it made him great at betting games. He would see the probabilities and he would know which option would win. Eventually, the other kids quit letting him play.

“You’re too lucky.”

“You always win.”

“It’s not fair.”

So he didn’t play. And he learned. If you’re too lucky, if you’re too good, you get cast out. When he trained to be a Spartan, he still won, but he made sure to lose just enough.

It wasn’t until sometime after the augmentations that he noticed something had changed.

The mist of probabilities was still there, but now if he tried he could change it. Nudge it just enough to change probabilities of a certain event here and there. For the rest of his basic training and during his mission against other humans, he never felt a need to play with the odds.

But then the Covenant attacked. Humanity was losing. Everywhere he looked people were dying and he decided he would try to change it.

He went out of his way to help. To save everyone who needed to be saved.

As long as the civilians got to safety, it didn’t matter if he got caught behind enemy lines with only a single clip of ammo and no backup. He would be fine. The Jackal would always run out of ammo before his own shields failed. The Elite would always misstep before it cut him down. The Hunter would always take a split second too long to turn.

There was no such thing as luck.

He couldn’t give the people _luck_.

But he could give them hope.

Hope that they would be safe. Hope that the war would be over. Hope that their hero would always be there to protect them.

He let himself become an idol, a man of myth, and he let the people believe what they wanted. They needed something to believe in. They needed a source of hope and he would always come back to give it to them.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> John-117 : Probability Manipulation


	2. Jenkins

He’d spent his entire life relishing the fact that he couldn’t get seriously hurt and now all he wanted was to be able to die.

As a child he never seemed to get sick, even if all the other kids at school came down with something. It was strange, but nothing too out of the ordinary.

As a teenager, he’d managed to fall off a cliff once. When he finally came to a stop at the bottom he’d been all smashed up and bleeding, with more than a few broken bones. A few hours later and he was able to start walking again. By the time he finally made it home, he had little more than a few rapidly disappearing scratches.

Naturally, he told his brother.

Naturally, they decided to test it.

They’d cut him, burned him, shot him and even tried to drown him (though that one was technically an accident). Each time he healed within a few hours, at most a day. He’d lost his little finger to a tractor he was trying to fix and it had grown back in about a week.

He was invincible.

So he joined the military.

He trained hard and discovered he had a knack for sharp-shooting. If any of his fellow soldiers or commanders noticed that he never received medical help, no matter the injury, they didn’t comment on it. He was careful to not be too obvious, and things were going well until the Covenant showed up.

In one fell swoop he lost almost everyone he knew and loved.

Suddenly he cared less about being careful. He jumped at Johnson’s offer to join the Marines and threw himself into his career. The Covenant were big and ugly, but they went down the same as any enemy. Even if they landed a hit, he knew it would heal. War became routine.

When they landed on the Halo, he expected more of the same – the same song and dance, just on a different stage. But there was something different. Something not quite right. A sense of unease that permeated the atmosphere and set everyone on edge.

He was already unsettled when the sounds of movement echoed through the dark Forerunner space. Seeing _them_ – the abhorrent lumps of flesh he’d come to learn were called Flood – had made him panic. Instinct took over and he wanted to run, to disappear, to be anywhere else but in that room. He forgot his training, forgot how to shoot, forgot he even had a gun. Maybe it would have made a difference, maybe not. It hardly mattered when he went down screaming, trying to fight off a mound of the monsters. He felt his skin break, felt the tendrils trying to work their way into his body, felt his body trying to heal around it. He didn’t stay conscious for long.

Sometime later, he couldn’t know how long, he realized he was awake. His body was moving, but he wasn’t the one in control. Horror flooded his mind as he figured out what was happening. One of the things was _inside him_. He could feel it in his head, trying to chase him out of his own mind. What he could feel of his body, he could tell had been misshapen into something vaguely human but not quite.

A few other Marines, or what was left of them, shuffled aimlessly around him. He tried talking to them a few times but they didn’t respond. The thing in his head seemed to resent when he tried to take control or communicate. It would spur it into a mild frenzy and there would be a burst of pain behind his eyes as it tried to burrow further into his flesh, only to have its progress pushed back by his body’s healing.

They were locked in a horrible stalemate and Jenkins couldn’t see a way out of it.

The thing couldn’t take full control because his body healed too quickly. His body couldn’t cast the thing out because it moved around any time it was threatened.

He lurched to one side, suddenly the one in control of his legs, and tried to scream as pain exploded in his mind and radiated through his nerves.

He wanted to die.

The shambling group of corpses crested a hill and launched into a surprisingly agile attack. Jenkins felt his body join in and quit fighting for a while hoping one of the Marines, hell one of the Covenant even, would shoot him. Maybe he and the thing would both die.

Someone shot him in the head and as he crashed into the ground he had hope that this was it. But then he felt the healing and felt the thing and wanted to scream. One of the Marines said something about “capture” and “alive” and he tried to cry out. He tried to attack them, hoping they would change their idea from capture to kill, but to no avail.

He sat, shackled and restrained, and tried to communicate. Whether he wanted to curse or beg or just talk to someone he wasn’t sure, but he tried anyway. What came out wasn’t a language he knew, more just a gurgling moan through a shredded and repaired throat, and he howled in frustration.

He couldn’t speak, couldn’t heal, couldn’t even cry.

He was a prisoner inside his own body.

He just wanted to die.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> PFC Wallace Jenkins : Accelerated Healing


	3. The Rookie

At first, he just thought they were headaches – dull, pounding aches that left him dizzy and tired and gave him weird dreams. If the dreams happened to be related to something or someone he’d come in contact with shortly before, that was just a coincidence, right? Because that was how dreams worked. It wasn’t until he started seeing things that ended up coming true, playing out exactly as he’d seen them, that he thought there might be something more to it.

He tried to talk to one of his squad mates about the headaches and the apparent visions. They’d laughed, going along with what they thought was a joke, and then awkwardly found an excuse to leave when they realized he was serious about it. A few days later and he had a surprise appointment for a psych eval.

Of course, he lied to the doctor: It was just a prank. He didn’t mean anything by it. Yes, he should’ve stopped sooner. No, it wouldn’t happen again.

After that, he kept everything to himself but made his own notes about what he experienced. He was determined to figure out what this was and how it worked. It took a couple of years, but he finally thought he understood (mostly).

  * The visions were always related to either an object or a person he’d touched or brushed up against.
  * They were stronger and clearer when the object of interest was relevant to him in some way – the stronger the emotional connection, the better the vision.
  * They were harder to control and predict when he was tired or hungry and they tended to leave him exhausted if they struck when he was already running low. It was easier for him to find places to nap than unattended food, so he solved this problem by perfecting the power nap (much to the amusement of his new team).



The more he experimented with his abilities, the less intense the headaches became. After a few years of work the pain was almost non-existent and he could skip straight to the vision part. He’d even started figuring out how to control which objects could cause the reaction, making it so the visions happened on his terms and not the random whims of the universe.

He still kept them a secret from his teammates and superiors, though he occasionally used them on the job. If asked about how he knew something, he would just shrug and call it a hunch or make up some “clue” he’d noticed that everyone else had missed. Higher ranking officers would occasionally peer at him funny, like they knew he was omitting something, but his fellow members of Alpha Nine were content to let him be. More than anything they seemed amused by their weird, sleepy detective of a teammate.

Never was he more grateful for his ability than when he was stranded in New Mombasa.

When he woke up after the drop, his mission clock told him he’d lost six hours. There were no communications from anyone or anything other than the city’s AI and no obvious signs of where his team had landed or gone. The AI would occasionally do things to help him out – changing road signs, ringing phones, moving barriers, things like that – but seemed limited to a set script of generic municipal alerts.

At first, he’d felt a little ridiculous following “Keep Right” and “Stay Left” signs through the city in the dark. From time to time he’d run into a group of Covenant soldiers, but never anything so large he couldn’t handle it. It wasn’t until he’d been led into a building, following a trail of odd symbols upstairs, and found the ONI agent’s helmet embedded in a television that he understood what the AI was doing.

Whether it knew what he could do (unlikely) or was just trying to give him clues, Rookie didn’t know, but he finally understood the AI wasn’t just running him around in circles. It was genuinely trying to help him find his team. And by leading him to personal objects, it was handing him the exact tools he needed to figure out what had happened and where they might be now.

Each object he came to – the helmet, the rifle, the turret – he would hold it or lay a hand on it and focus. The world around him would be replaced with a hazy composite view of past events. Reality lurched sideways and he was a silent observer of a past he hadn’t been involved in. It showed him what he needed to know – Buck and Romeo meeting up; Dutch and Mickey meeting up; all four of them meeting up, trying to find him, trying to find Dare.

Thankfully, Dare didn’t ask any questions when he showed up outside the door. Neither did Buck when they finally met up (though he was a little distracted). It saved him the effort of figuring out how best to not answer and he was more than happy to be relegated to Engineer Babysitter.

More than once on the way out of the city he wondered if he could read anything off the Engineer. It wasn’t a human, but he could read things off objects, so maybe it would work? Though this was probably not the time to try. He’d long since burned through his emergency rations and was already feeling pretty tired. It wouldn’t do him (or the team) any good if he suddenly passed out.

He decided maybe he’d try later, assuming the Engineer was still around and not whisked away by ONI as soon as they got somewhere safe.

After he holed up and slept for about 16 hours, of course. He deserved a nice, long nap.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The Rookie : Psychometry/Precognition


End file.
